From an economics perspective this would seem to be true. Anecdotally, I wonder how many of your average sports fans think cycling is the dirtiest sport because there were positive doping tests? I mean compared to the big team sports (football/soccer, NFL, NHL, MLB, etc), or tennis, or track and athletics
The problem is that they can't go so far that it starts to create problems that people are going to look into, like the early 90s deaths in cycling that, whether or not they were due to EPO or not, started to set people's noses twitching, especially when the level got ridiculous in the mid-90s. If the performances are so ludicrous that the fans are baulking, then you have to do a clean-up job.
Fans are always more likely to baulk at what they see in a 'pure' athletic endeavour than a skill game, because it's easier to kid yourself. No amount of drugs will turn your average Ligue-2 player into Kylian Mbappé... but the drugs might help those players be able to still perform those skills 95 minutes into the game.
Even strength type things like field events, even though there are plenty of drugs in those, somebody could just get the perfect rhythm, the perfect weather conditions, the perfect moment for a one-off throw or leap, such that a crazy outlier like, say, Bob Beamon's long jump record does not attract the same suspicion as Flo-Jo's 100m, or the records of Marita Koch and Jarmila Kratochvílová. There is literally a book about the 1988 Olympic men's 100m final called (in English),
The Dirtiest Race in History. Everyone in the race save for Robson da Silva and Calvin Smith has been busted for doping. But Johnson... you could tell just by looking at him. He was one of those who got too blatant and had to be taken down as a result, because it's important that the audience be able to suspend their disbelief.
And that's the key, really. In sports like soccer, fans will always be able to suspend their disbelief because they'll look at the skills rather than the physical feats that the players are pulling off. When physical feats are the totality of the sport (tactics willing of course), like athletics, cycling, cross-country skiing, swimming and other sports that depend primarily on your physiological engine and efficiency, there is always the risk of being too much of an outlier for that suspension of disbelief. It's why even in my more naïve days I found Cândido Barbosa's August exploits unpalatable, why the likes of Mirsamad Pourseyedi and Rahim Emami on the Asia Tour are figures of fun. As long as the show is fun, people will suspend their disbelief a little longer, which is probably the main factor in their favour for the time being - but should they win all 3 GTs in this dominant a fashion, should Kuss domestique all 3 GTs and stay this strong throughout, Wout van Aert doing Wout van Aert things, Christophe Laporte winning multiple classics and so on all the way, then more and more people will be unable to suspend disbelief any further.
But let's let them actually do that first. Even Alejandro Valverde, whose high base level meant his ability to get results from February to October was legendary, ran out of gas when he tried to do all three GTs back to back with a significant role. There's been many a case of a team or rider looking imperious in a GT only to capitulate. Think of Purito and his Katyusha troop in the 2012 Vuelta, Simon Yates in the 2018 Giro or Tom Dumoulin in the 2015 Vuelta. Or, hell, Primož Roglič in the 2020 Tour. One of Jumbo's main problems then was an abject failure to capitalise on strong form, due to the insanely negative racing that sparked the whole Sepp-Kuss-never-works thing. They've gone the opposite way now, and are going full cannibal.
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